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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Africa Trip Part 4 - Serengeti, Tanzania

After a plane ride, a long drive in a car with a young and sophisticated woman at the wheel, careful and
thorough customs checks when leaving Kenya and later arriving in Tanzania, and another
plane ride, we arrived in the Serengeti. It turns out the Serengeti is located
just a couple hours drive from where we were in the Masai Mara, but because of some
kind of feud between the Kenyan and Tanzanian governments the nearby border was
closed causing us to unnecessarily spend hours and the big bucks to get to our first
Tanzanian destination.

However, all was forgiven when our guide Nathan met us
at the airport. Throughout our three-day stay there, he took us on what I
thought were the most interesting game drives of our entire time in Africa –
imagine seeing a mother and baby rhino before we even arrived at our next tent
camp, the Olakira.

On that first drive we also saw two kinds of vultures,
storks, hippos, elephants, and Masai giraffes. But the rhinos were the find of the
day – perhaps even of the whole trip. Even Nathan hadn’t seen any rhinos in
months.

The Olakira camp is much more traditional – without the
elegant appointments of the Elephant Pepper camp. However, it does have running
water into the sink making it much easier to wash out undies, a curtain separating
the bath from the bedroom, and a large screened in living room outside of the
bedroom. The food, however, was way worse.

As we traveled around the Serengeti with Nathan for three days, we began to call him a tracking genius. We saw leopards, lions, the Agama
lizard that looks like Spiderman, many more kinds of antelopes, a very pregnant
zebra, and more gorgeous birds including the woodland kingfisher, the lilac breasted
roller, the gray heron, the yellow throated long claw, the gray headed social
weaver, the little bee eater, and the marabou stork.

Nathan also taught us some
more Swahili words (Swahili is the language of Tanzania whereas the Kenyans
speak English). “Twende” means let’s go and “Semama” means stop. Also
“Pole-pole” means slowly, slowly. We used those words a lot while we were
driving around. He also had his own language for asking us if we needed to stop
to pee. “Do you need to “Pick a flower?” he’d ask ,and if we did he’d find us a
suitable bush to hide behind.

The most exciting part of our Serengeti stay – aside from
the rhino sightings – was watching the wildebeest and zebra cross the Mara
River from the Kenya side to where we were in Tanzania - called the Migration. Nathan was intent. He
took us back to the crossing point several times and finally when we were about
to give it up we saw another game driver racing a ways up on the road we were
on. Nathan followed at about 60 mph with the four of us in an open land rover
without seat belts. But it was worth it. We got there just in time to see the
wildebeests and a few zebras – about 500 animals in all – cross. It was like a
stampede. Some were on each other’s backs. They filed down the cliff on the
Kenya side, got into the water, swam, climbed over rocks, swam some more until
they got to our side, and climbed out. A couple had trouble. One made it and
was the last one out. The other appeared to be stuck between two rocks and
couldn’t figure out how to back up to get out. Instead it kept struggling until
exhausted. The croc hovering nearby never attacked. It just waited patiently for the wildebeest
to die on its own. It was so sad to watch that we left before the croc got
its dinner.

That afternoon, on our ride with Nathan, he miraculously found us another rhino. Out of only forty-five rhinos in the whole area, we were lucky to see three of them. And then it absolutely poured down rain the rest of the day.

Stay tuned for the next installment about Lake Manyara and
the Ngorongoro Crater, also in Tanzania.

National Association of Memoir Writers

About Me

Madeline SharplesI’ve worked most of my professional life as a technical writer, grant writer, and proposal process manager and began writing poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction when my oldest son, Paul, was diagnosed as manic depressive. I continued writing as a way to heal since his death by suicide in 1999. My memoir, "Leaving the Hall Light On," first released on Mother's Day 2011 in hard cover, is about living with my son's bipolar disorder and surviving his suicide. My publisher, Dream of Things, is launching a paperback edition in July 2012 and an eBook in August 2012. I also co-edited Volumes 1 and 2 of "The Great American Poetry Show," a poetry anthology, and wrote the poems for two books of photography, "The Emerging Goddess" and "Intimacy." Besides having many poems published in print and online magazines, I write regularly for several websites: Naturally Savvy, PsychAlive, Open to Hope,and Journeys Through Grief and occasionally for The Huffington Post. I maintain two blogs: Choices and at Red Room.